Distributed Digest: Friday, January 11, 2019

CoinGate will start a Litecoin Lightning Network trial, Decentraland has a new software development kit, and Decenter wonders whether the keyword “Ethereum” has been blacklisted by Google Ads.

Your daily distillation of crypto news for Friday, January 11, 2019:

CoinGate Eyes the Litecoin LN

Cryptocurrency payment gateway CoinGate will soon begin its trial of the Litecoin Lightning Network (LN), according to information shared with ETHNews. The first group to participate in this trial will be the VPN company Surfshark, a longtime merchant on the gateway.

Veronika Mishura, CoinGate’s marketing manager, told ETHNews that Surfshark is a good company to start with. “LN is definitely a solution for this kind of products, especially keeping in mind that VPNs, VPS and hostings are probably one of the most popular products for crypto-enthusiasts,” she explained.

Later, the trial will launch for most of CoinGate’s merchants and, possibly, for all 4,500 of them. The trial period is slated to conclude at the end of February.

The Litecoin LN has experienced some growth, recently surpassing 100 nodes. Mishura said CoinGate hopes to further boost the network with its trial.

Last year, CoinGate launched a pilot program to accept bitcoin LN payments across over 100 merchants on the gateway.

New Year, New Decentraland SDK

Ethereum-based virtual reality platform Decentraland is also releasing a new service. Decentraland announced its upgraded software development kit (SDK) on Wednesday, January 9. Since launching its original SDK in April 2018 to allow individuals to build interactive content for the platform, the Decentraland team has received a lot of feedback from the community regarding how to improve the developer experience.

All this feedback has led to the new SDK, which features an entity-component-system (ECS) architecture. “An ECS is a well known and proven game development pattern for writing code that’s high-performance by default,” Decentraland explained in its announcement. Ultimately, the ECS architecture will enable the crew to “build graphical development tools,” which Decentraland maintains “will improve the experience of creating content, making the Decentraland platform more accessible for everyone.”

The new SDK boasts various other improvements, including, but not limited to, imperative-style entity life cycles (which lead to more intuitive code), the incorporation of game loops, and object movements based on incremental changes.

Decenter: Is “Ethereum” No Longer an Accepted Keyword on Google Ads?

One group, though, has been experiencing some hiccups. Ethereum research and development organization Decenter discovered that as of January 9, its advertisements on Google Ads containing the keyword “Ethereum” have stopped displaying. Decenter was receiving impressions up until January 8, but the traffic suddenly dropped off.

The team reached out to Google over Twitter, but the response directed Decenter to Google’s guidelines for cryptocurrency advertising, even though the ads in question mention key phrases like “Ethereum security audits” and “Ethereum development services,” not cryptocurrency-related terms. Further, Decenter noted that keywords like “ICO,” “bitcoin,” and “EOS” did not seem to be blacklisted, only the word “Ethereum.”

Because of all this, the team is concerned that Google might be targeting Ethereum. However, some community members responded to Decenter, saying that although Google may have political and economic agendas, blacklisting “Ethereum” probably represents more of a blanket ban to avoid crypto scams in general rather than a targeted action.

Dani Putney is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor’s degree in English writing from the University of Nevada, Reno, where he also studied journalism and queer theory. In his free time, he writes poetry, plays the piano, and fangirls over fictional characters. He lives with his partner, three dogs, and two cats in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.